My Lead Agency's Ramblings & Rants

Social Media, and lead generation, is all about the humor

  

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I hosted a webinar yesterday for our partner OnPath.  The guest panelists were Tim Washer (@timwasher) and Deborah Strickland (@deborahs) of Cisco. It was a fun 29 minute discussion (not counting Q&A) about social media and the lessons that Cisco - the 2010 B2B Twitterer of the Year - has learned. These people were really honest and transparent, and I might add, very funny. I hope we can work together again and I suggest you follow them on Twitter. With that said, the webinar attempted to tackle the following six questions in our relatively tight timeline:

1. How does Cisco use social media and why?
2. Does a higher volume of views, fans, followers, subscribers, translate into more sales?
3. How many people does it take to manage a successful social media strategy?
4. What can a small-medium size company do to get started? Do they need a plan or just jump into it?
5. How do you coordinate the technology of scheduling posts, building lists, and measuring clicks with team collaboration?
6. Should a company consider outsourcing these activities?

Sidebar: If GoToWebinar is listening, you folks really need to work on your conference call technology.  The webinar started 7 minutes late because of major issues and tech support never get to us until after we had resolved the matter. That said, a big shout-out to all of those who patiently waited for the webinar to start.  We didn't lose a single audience member! Thanks!

What Tim and Deborah shared can best be summarized as follows:

• Use humor to engage: whether it's in your posts, or in your content you create (videos, blogs, etc.), people react better, and engage more, with a touch of humor.
• Be transparent, be relational: don't just push your posts out there non-stop, rather you should be conversational and honest with your audience. It should be a two-way dialog but not necessarily an ongoing diatribe of your daily existence.
• Sit back and watch while you're getting started.  You'll soon figure out who is worthy of watching and engaging with compared to who is simply shouting/spamming with no interest in being "social".
• Use services like Technorati to find cool blogs to follow, and then get active contributing.
• Look at your competitors and see what they're doing.  There is a good chance that you should be following some of the same people they do.
• Create a schedule and stick to it.  Consistency is critical.
• Social Media takes a lot of effort.  Don't let others in your organization make the false assumption otherwise.  Assume at least an hour or two per day.  If you don't have the time, or the additional resources or budget, to make that commitment then consider eliminating something else from your existing marketing mix or daily obligations.
• Social Media does not necessarily result in a dramatic increase in lead generation activity.  It does, however, positively impact your search engine optimization (SEO), your thought leadership, and your exposure.  It's great to get a handle on what customers are saying about you or your services and products, and it absolutely allows you to respond to any concern they may have.
• There is lots of technology out there, so use it.  The usual suspects like Tweetdeck or Hootsuite are good, but so are more analytical tools like Radian6 or PostRank.
• Outsourcing of social media is a challenging thing, as the vendor will never know your business like you do.  That said, it can be safely done in controlled circumstances with sufficient checks and balances.
• Foremost, what I took away, was a comment that for social media to be successful, you have to have a goal.  Once you start the program, always be measuring against your goals. What was very interesting was the observation that your goal may not be the same as what others in your organization believe the goals should be.  That means you need to get consensus early in the process.

Of course, I'm just hitting the high notes.  The actual webinar is worthy of a quick listen.  The questions submitted by the audience were powerful and the answers were honest.

Thanks to @onpath for the opportunity to host. 

If you want to hear it yourself, you can find the recorded version here.